Recent comments by John B Dick

It was used by mine owners to prevent legislation preventing small children being sent down mines and up chimneys. It is used by trade unionists to protect the rights of unions to protect their payroll deductions from large unionised workplaces including cigarette factories.

Anyone who uses the “jobs” argument demonstrates the lack of any legitimate justification, and nothing that they might say on this or any other topic should be taken at face value.

Independence would be good for the Scottish left. They might found the sort of party that John Smith, Donald Dewar and Robin Cook could be proud to be a part of (maybe even those of the Shinwell, Gallagher, Maclean generation too).

New Labour isn’t a political party, it is a leader cult. A fan club. The current problem is that (like the Conservatives) many are still loyal to a past leader.

Independence would cut them off from the cult and they would be lost.

Maybe the restructuring of the Scottish Left and getting rid of the banksters, free market fundamentalists and lobbyists could prove to be the unexpected great benefit of independence.

Bob Altemeyer’s e-book, “The Authoritarians” describes how these people react. Although it is about the political right in America, the principles apply to any cult.

Nobody seems to have noticed that AS has manoeuvred the UK cabinet into getting the blame for excluding increased devolution from the ballot. The whole truth doesn’t fit with either side’s narrative.

I’m not sure that that devo-max is what people want, for that would leave not much more than defence and foreign affairs with the UK. Trident and illegal wars that is, and these are thought to be drivers for independence.

What people may want is salami-sliced independence, so gradual and incremental that it might be a matter for future historians to debate at what precise point Scotland became independent while at the time nobody actually noticed.

If that’s what people want, they can’t have it anyway.

Only independence gives us a chance – and it is only a chance, not a guarantee – of protecting our distinctive traditions in Health and Education from the free market fundamentalists, privatisers and international capitalists who tell us that such so called “benefits” are unaffordable.

The NHS in Scotland is endangered by the privatisation in England and by the TTIP treaty. I am prepared to believe that the present Health Secretary (and three previous ones)are as committed as I am to defending the NHS and Scottish values. The question is not their competence or commitment but whether the forces against them can be defeated.

The only person in the transition to independence with ANY previous experience in their role at all is the present Queen whose experience is unparalleled in history and never likely to be matched.

The Queen of England is no use to us, but the Queen of Canada could be invaluable. She deployed a neat statutory instrument, bilingual in both the languages in which she is fluent. We might need that.

I don’t think that she has any Gaelic, but the Duke of Rothesay might manage to buy a black pudding.

This is no time to dispose of an experienced hand.

The republicans are not even ready with a proposal for a head of state. I’d go for a shortlist of current and former PO’s of the Scottish Parliament on lifetime appointments to age 75.

In UK as we have it now, what would we have got if we were a republic?

Present Thatcher?

President Blair?

Till we are guaranteed that we will be spared that sort of thing, the hereditary method has more in its favour than it seems at first sight, and the head of state is trained from birth by well chosen people.

We could contract it out to the private sector on a one year fun job for the mega rich. They would pay their own expenses and more. [Mugabe, Reagan, Trump, al Fayed]

There are lots of worse ways than a hereditary ceremonial head of state.

The idea that a change to a republic can be organised when the Queen dies is simply daft. Charles will be declared King within 24 hours.